Life as an IT Professional

If I had it all to do over again, I don’t think I would work in IT.  It’s too late now. I have a great job, that I love, but what I went through to get it, Jesus-God, never again.  I am finally, as of the last several months working in the sort of IT environment that I knew had to exist at some point but what I have found that IT people have to deal with, everyday of their lives, along my way, nearly drove me into the nuthouse.  Here is an experts view into the ass-backwards world of being an IT Professional. 

Life as an IT Professional is not what it once was.  Hackers and Identity Thieves have really ruined the fun for everyone.   Major financial institutions have taken the approach of "Let’s pass the buck to everyone else to defend themselves from these threats, instead of going after the perpetrators themselves".  Therefore, much of one’s time as an IT Professional is now spent taking preventative measures against such threats and then proving that you are protected to a never-ending parade of auditors and lawyers and business people or else they threaten to shut you down.  To me, this is a backwards system.

Imagine if once per year, a bunch of auditors showed up at your house and inspected your security system, and demanded all sorts of new updates to it that they have decided are necessary this year.  Then if you do not upgrade your security system to their standards within whatever timeframe they impose, they cancel your home owners insurance and site that you are not taking the necessary measures to prevent someone from robbing your house.  This is exactly how IT security works….exactly.
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The other issue is that, these auditors need jobs just like everyone else.  Therefore, there doesn't really need to be anything wrong with your security but they will find something wrong with it in order to keep themselves employed and on their "project". No matter how many locks and security systems that you have in place, there is always a way for someone to find a way to break in. This approach in an IT sense, wastes everyone’s time and money. It forces your talented individuals to attend meeting after meeting, forces managers to demand larger IT budgets, delays the completion of real work and just generally pisses everyone off.  IT auditing has become another invented industry. 

People who once were able to copiously sit at their desks and write code that addresses some sort of critical business need that will eventually make everyone’s life easier are now forced to sift through archives and massive file systems to verify that their companies are not keeping any sort of sensitive data.  Network personnel who once were able to work active directory and architect ingenious domain structures to perfectly align companies IT with its business structure now have to sit around and stare at logs within their check-point firewalls to ensure that no outside IP traffic is getting through to their internal network.  System administrators who used to be able to build servers and allocate server resources to match the various groups within a company are now forced to lock resources down to a point where they become borderline unusable.

IT Professionals, in this day and age, are expected to just remember hundreds of complex usernames and passwords for nearly everything they do.  There are even standards in place for these passwords and if they aren't up to the auditors standards, they then must be improved and re-memorized.   So, as an IT person, you end up with a bunch of systems that you can only access by remembering something like "GXB%%adm-TRIDEL$$".  If you have never worked in IT, you would find an IT person’s ability to remember these sorts of things incredible. 

Most IT people end up having to report to what we call "Business People".  By nature, IT people and "Business People" don't coexist well.   To me, this is highlighted by the typical business person preceding whatever question they ask you with "Is it possible for you too....".   Unfortunately, in the world of IT, just about anything is technically "possible".   It may take 8 months and 2 million dollars to make it happen but of course it is "possible".  For this reason, IT people are forced to spend a great deal of time trying to explain these things to business people within emails that the business folks are simply not wired to understand.  Such email threads can go on for days, weeks or months and every time the IT person has to re-explain the problem to the business person, that IT person dies a little more inside. 

“IT” is usually looked at as a “service” for the rest of the employees within a company, which I agree with. IT departments are inherently negative revenue entities so it kind of has to be this way.  However, this system does fuel a culture of ridiculous IT demands, unprofessional emails, phone calls from non-IT employees and completely backwards prioritization tactics imposed by non-IT management.  This is why a network admin often has to stop fixing a major issue within a company’s network to go fix a CEO's personal laptop that he decided to bring in to work that day.  This could all be resolved by allowing the best IT personnel to manage the IT departments instead of typical business people who view IT as a service that they just have to pay for and in turn get a return out of.

Our talents allow companies the ability to do whatever they dream of in their marketing brainstorming sessions and their board meetings and their sales seminars.  Without what we do, they would be little more than a collection of people who know about accounting and finance, staring at each other, and trying not to walk into the walls.  They know this, we know this but the, "IT Nerd" culture still exists in this country.  The people and industries that have come up with every major advancement that our country has had over the past 20 years are still looked down on by a bunch of people who panic and nearly piss their pants when their email doesn't start automatically when their laptop boots up.

There isn't much worse than a non-IT person making assumptions about you when he/she finds out that you work in IT.   Generally, they will say something to you like "Whoa, you work in IT?  You must have a really sweet computer at your house!!"   I often want to reply with something like, "Actually, working for people like you all my life has all but ruined the idea of touching a computer when I don't absolutely have to, in my personal life".  But I usually restrain myself and say something like "yeah". 

IT personnel are held to a much higher standard than anyone else.  Let’s use a marketing person for examples sake.  If a marketing person comes up with an idea to say, improve visual merchandising within a store and it fails, and the company loses money because of it, they might get a bad review that year or a stern talking to. Then they move on with their lives and are free to come up with their next terrible idea. Conversely, if an IT person misses one phone call, at 3 o'clock in the morning, when they were sleeping, and some random piece of data doesn't get to where it is supposed to be in time, they either get fired, or don't hear the end of it for years of their professional life.  Therefore IT people must keep their work issued phones/blackberry/laptops handy, at all times, in the event of just such an “emergency”.  Having to drag around multiple pieces of media and technical equipment with you, everywhere you go, for years of your life is a terrible existance.

The old adage,” most people aren’t paid to understand IT”, to me, is getting a bit old.  By now, in 2011, everyone has and has had a computer at home for at least the last decade.  Yet, the frequency of IT illiterate persons within our companies remains static.  How can this be?  How do they keep from running themselves over with their cars in the driveway?  How do they get dressed?  How do they not know the difference between a hard drive and a monitor in 2011?  What are they doing here?  What could they possibly be so good at, while knowing so little about such simple concepts that warrants their continued employment?  Now, I don’t expect people to understand routing tables or scripting or how to tune a server or configure a farm of virtual machines but people, by now, should know how to restart a laptop without taking the battery out of it. 

There is a lot of garbage, in our new world that falls under the IT umbrella.  It seems to grow on a daily basis.  I was recently contacted by a recruiter who wanted to know how much I knew about Infrared transistors and Blackberry Support.  What kind of job is that supposed to be?  What poor fool do you have working on that vast swath of trash now?  Every IT person at least once every few months is forced into supporting or building or maintaining some kind of system or environment that they know nothing about.  This is because most business folks view IT personnel as generic entities that can do everything from writing VB scripts to installing phones, to fixing DVD players.  

This is IT as it currently works in this country.  If you are gifted and motivated enough to work for a Google or a Microsoft or a Facebook then you probably know a level of respect for your creativity and motivation that most of us will never know.  But the rest of us, just have to keep plugging away, keep on dealing with what has become the most annoying industry to work in since Al Gore invented the internet.